One portion of the servant class, chiefly those persons whose occupation is vicarious leisure, come to undertake a new, subsidiary range of duties-the vicarious consumption of goods.
Thorstein Veblen 1
So, for art and culture, the discussion of the end of the ideology of progress boils down to a single question-is artistic activity able to maintain a critical function if it is cut off from an emancipation project?
Thierry de Duve 2
Jennifer Locke's installation Embarkation or Return, produced in collaboration with partner John Stevens, utilizes the Rococo as a metaphor for the decadence of the present situation of society in which consumption as spectacle 3 is pervasive.
At the left of the gallery entrance a text panel with faux brocade background defines the work. Within the Studio Gallery, to the left of the entrance a reconstruction of a palanquin, or sedan chair, awaits its passenger, a viewer whose regard is to be directed at the other components of the installation. On the wall facing the gallery entrance, six posters combine image and text in an exigesis Rococo motifs transformed into kitsch objects for contemporary conspicuous consumption. 4 Diagonally across the gallery floor are strewn a plethora of plastic roses, leading from the sedan chair to an appropriated, altered simulacrum, significantly enlarged, of Antoine Watteau's Embarkation from Cythera. 5 This appropriation of Embarkation from Cythera replaces the golden barge in Watteau's luminous distant space with the Dallas skyline, eliminates the elegant and graceful figures, and clones extra roses into the right foreground. The addition of roses to the right foreground of the Watteau image and the plastic roses on the gallery floor combine the space of the image and the space of the gallery, placing the viewer in the work in place of the deleted figures of Watteau's fête galante. Watteau's vision of young lovers preparing to depart from, or to, Aphrodite's island utopia where
Lá, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté
Luxe, calme et volupté 6
is transformed into a distopia, or a distopia (mis)taken for a utopia.
Several issues are engaged in this. Most salient is that of the relation of artworld and lifeworld. Otherwise regarded, what is at issue, for this installation and more broadly for art in general, is the issue of the efficacy of art in the lifeworld. It may be urged that inasmuch as artworks are products of human agency produced within the framework of a cultural polity, all artworks have a political aspect. Even if this is granted, there remains the question of whether, as Thierry de Duve has said, art can engage a critical function after the end of the ideology of progress, which is profoundly imbricated with modernity and Modernism. 7 The matter is not simple, for already within the early phase of Modernism, the ideology of progress was problematic. 8 'Ideology' is understood here as a rationalization of the situation of a society, a metanarrative constructed by members of a society to explain the way things are. While postmodernism has functioned as a deconstruction of the metanarratives by which a culture renders its situation in a manner accepted from within the culture as rational, 10 this has hardly resulted in an evaporation of metanarratives in general, or of the metanarative of progress in particular.
Any metanarative of progress presupposes a diachronic aspect: historical time that underlies the sequence of works, which at once engages a linear notion of history as progressive. Progressiveness is thus supposed to subsist in the works as sequentially disposed in a diachronic array, such that at least on the whole, or in exemplars valorized by some criteria. Development, in some sense, is supposed to be manifest in the sequence, if not in synchronically determined groups of works or in individual works.10 So it may be, if the field of objects is carefully selected according to criteria appropriate to ordering the sequence. If one observes not a perpetual progress, but a decline, a decay from some position regarded as paradigmatic, then progress is constrained by limits. Suppose one's regard has a broader compass, inclusive not only of such objects as constitute a canon, but of visual objects in general. Then motifs, styles, objects may on occasion slip from one field to another, from the canonic to kitsch. 11 Whether such motifs, styles, objects retain their original signification after such a slippage is doubtful. The motifs, styles, objects occupy a different position, not merely within a particular field, but between fields of cultural practices and discourses. Thus mere repetition does not obtain; as Heraclitus urges, "Upon those that step into the same rivers different and different waters flow." 12 Neither, however, is the original signification of the object obviated. Something like a Hegelian sublation obtains, so that the entity is no longer neither simply itself, nor simply negated, but at once itself and not itself. 13 Rosalind Krauss contends that "within the situation of postmodernism, practice is not defined in relation to a given medium . . . but rather in relation to the logical operation on a set of cultural terms . . . ." 14
Locke's move with this installation operates on a set of cultural terms to conduct a practice in which art functions critically to problematize the commodification of antecedent cultural artifacts and periods. In so doing, the work repositions the artwork from being a manifestation of the inner structure of a cultural period to a mirror to catch the conscious of our kings. 15 Can such a practice avoid implicating itself in the critique it instantiates, indeed without obviating the notion of artwork as commodity?
Jennifer Locke was Adjunct Professor of Art at Brookhaven College School of the Arts before assuming the position of Assistant Professor of Art at Bowling Green State University School of the Arts in September 2004. She will join the faculty of Eastern Michigan University Fall 2005. Locke received the Bachelor of Fine Arts from Kansas City Art Institute and the Master of Fine Arts from Wichita State University.